Hey! Stop reading if you haven’t seen Episode 404 of Showtime’s Homeland and don’t want it spoiled.

I don’t know if I have the stomach for this much “ick.”

Throughout that whole last sequence, I kept mentally begging Ayaan to get up and leave. “Stop. No. Bad. Don’t do it. Stand up. Walk out. RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN! WHILE THIS SHOW IS STILL WATCHABLE!”

A sudden escape would have been interesting: Carrie having to face the limits of her cynical seduce-the-source technique. The rest of the team finally pointing to a tactical setback that proves there’s more to intelligence work than amorally manipulating assets, mentally, emotionally, and sexually.

But no. Perhaps understandably (though perhaps not), the virginal medical student succumbs to Carrie’s succubus routine. I suppose it’s only inevitable that the complications from their unholy coupling will color the rest of the season.

They’re already coloring my perspective on the first three seasons. Maybe the show we all viewed as a hot-mess love story was really just the first installment of Carrie’s Black Widow Chronicles.

How many of us will be able to endure another installment?

Carrie’s total lack of scruples actually gave this episode its unifying theme. Quinn is worried about her, as well as terrified of her. “He’s the one who wigged out,” Carrie protests when Saul mentions Quinn’s qualms about her behavior, as if nearly drowning your baby before abandoning her is totally sane.

Carrie is even less receptive when Quinn gently raises the subject of his own guilt for killing that kid back in Caracas. “What I need, Quinn, is your help. Not your goddamn foot on the brake!”

Thankfully, Fara is there to depress that particular pedal just as Carrie is about to send them all into the streets for a Wild West shootout with Farad Gazi. As Gazi crumples his cell phone and packs his bye-bye bag, Fara calls to report a “game-changer.” She has video of Ayaan handing a sack of meds to his uncle, Haissam Haqqani, the Taliban terrorist who was confirmed killed in that airstrike on the wedding party in Waziristan. Except instead of being dead, Haqqani is gallivanting around Islamabad with a few S.U.V.’s full of gunmen, raising all kinds of juicy questions about the I.S.I.’s hit on Sandy Bachman.

It was admittedly fun to watch Carrie and Quinn compute the implications: the I.S.I faked Haqqani’s death so the C.I.A. would stop tracking him, then killed Sandy as part of a coverup. Or some such.

What Fara is slow to realize is that her star-pupil discovery spells disaster for Ayaan, whose dreams of enrolling at the Royal College of Medicine are no longer operational in Carrie’s mind.

“Do you know what a stalking horse is?” Carrie excitedly asks Fara, eager to elucidate her plan to properly fuck over the only survivor of the disastrous airstrike she signed off on at the request of a corrupt station chief. A stalking horse, it turns out, is a local kid who’s dumb and horny enough to allow the C.I.A. to use him as a decoy to lure in his uncle.

I’m not saying Ayaan is completely innocent. He’s collaborating with a terrorist, even if he is family, and giving him stolen drugs, even if they could be life-saving medication for some sick relative.

But Carrie’s seduction op is bound to go bad whether Ayaan is innocent or guilty. If he’s innocent, she’s a monster. If he’s guilty, she’s setting herself up for another emotional entanglement with a terrorist.

Either way, Homeland is returning to territory it covered to death, literally, in its first three seasons.

Why couldn’t the kid have just kept it in his pants?!

Random notes:

• Mandy Patinkin is still the best. How about that coda he adds to the scene with the I.S.I. douchebag? Saul still believes in Carrie, and he still believes in the work, but it takes a toll. Going at a Pakistani intelligence chief like that will take years off your life, or so I’m told.

• What fun to see old Duck Philips—I mean actor Mark Moses—join the Homeland team, and as Ambassador Boyd’s corrupt husband, no less! This is one plot line I’m excited to see unfold, even if the contours are reasonably predictable: Dennis Boyd makes a false step, Saul catches him, Saul and Martha are pushed into each other’s arms, Saul decides he owes Mira his loyalty after all—something like that, anyway.

• How about those opinions expressed by the Pakistani general Saul meets at his club? Americans are personae non grata in Pakistani social circles since the raid on bin Laden’s compound; 9/11 was a hoax providing cover for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan; the Americans have lost the battle for Afghanistan, just like the Russians, and the Taliban will set the terms of their withdrawal. Something tells me Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon didn’t just dream those up over a case of Red Bull.

• I have a strong feeling John Redmond is not going to make it out of this season alive.